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Category Archives: Graduation

My daughters graduation photo’s arrived along with a quote to retouch the blemishes.

After my first thought of,

“She hasn’t any blemishes and if she does, I’m going to be the one to retouch them.”

I began to think… What about all those parents who are now faced with that choice? Even if you don’t buy the photographs, at least one will end up in the school year book.

In a graduating year do you want your son or daughter to be the only child with the acne marks typical of so many teenagers? Personally I think if you are going to retouch blemishes on one kid you do it for them all. But then where does it go from here? Do we offer to:

Straighten teeth?

Take a crook out of a nose?

Pin back ears?

Shape eyebrows?

Add highlights?

Don’t we want to remember our friends as they really are? What does it do to a child’s self esteem if they are the only one who doesn’t look “perfect”?

Do we as Photographers or Image Editors have any moral responsibility?

Growing up in England we never had this problem. The last day of our equivalent of High School, we simply went into assembly, sang Jerusalem and left with promises to keep in touch. (In the UK you don’t “graduate” until you leave University or College.) On this side of the Atlantic things are very different.

Over the last few years there has been a movement to ask the media, and in particular magazines aimed at young girls, to state when an image has been altered or “Photoshopped”.

“Oh…that’s been Photoshopped.”

Is generally not a compliment.

Long before Photoshop we looked at altered sketches in catalogs and airbrushed photos of models. (I can remember my mother pouring over Vogue Pattern Books.) Did we ever believe that people really looked like that? I don’t know if we did back then but obviously, in North America at least, we do now.

51% of 9-10 year old girls feel better about themselves when they’re dieting

53% of 13 year old girls are unhappy with their bodies; by the time they’re 17, 78% of them will be

By the time they’re 17, these girls have seen 250,000 TV commercials telling them they should be a decorative object, sex object or a body size they can never achieve.

7 million girls and women under 25 suffer from eating disorders (myNEDA.org)

40% of newly identified cases of anorexia are in girls 15-19 years old. A rise in incidence of anorexia in young women 15-19 in each decade since 1930. Anorexia has the highest rate of mortality of any mental illness. (myNEDA.org)80% of women feel worse about themselves after seeing a beauty ad. $20B is spent on beauty marketing in the US annually. That’s a lot of money being spent making women feel worse about themselves.

Nearly 25 million people – male and female – are suffering from anorexia, bulimia or binge eating disorder (myNEDA.org)
3-12% of teen boys use anabolic steroids in pursuit of a lean, muscular ideal

Up until recently it simply never occurred to me that anyone would take any of those images as reality. Women’s magazines are for the most part, about fantasy and always have been.

I mean yes of course, there is always the one person who really is that thin and that beautiful naturally,

(Alison if you weren’t so nice I would hate you every time you have two portions of fries covered in gravy, followed by a chocolate bar and a can of pop then complain you can’t gain an once.)

and for every nine people who want to loose weight their is that one who is desperate to gain but when did we stop looking at the real people around us? For most magazines it would be simpler to say all photos have been retouched or to simply point out any image that hadn’t been.

Photoshop isn’t to blame, nor is any other form of digital manipulation but for those who don’t know the difference it is obviously disastrous.